JOÃO ALVES

João Alves (b. 1983, Porto) is an artist who moves on the margins of dominant social conventions. Not even the training in Fine Arts has tamed the free and non-aligned spirit that defines him. He has therefore made his countercurrent course, away from the limelight, without yearning for recognition. In solitary or collective actions, he has been giving rise to his creative multidisciplinarity mainly in the underground art scene, under multiple pseudonyms of which the best known is the one of Selva – anagram of Alves.

His works often represent surrealist universes of indefinite time, overcrowded by fantastic hybrid figures that seem to have come out of an orgiastic carnival feast of the medieval period or just arrived from the most remote outer space to execute the predicted apocalyptic end for the world we know. In other paintings, he presents games of masks and mirrors that reflect situations of dualistic antithesis, often immersing in a mystical and esoteric symbolism.

All presented purposely without great aesthetic refinement, sometimes grotesquely, even in a line very close to the expression of tribal ritual art or urban mural art. It is inevitable that we consider references to Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel, but let it not be forgotten that these pictures also carry, albeit unconsciously, on the aesthetic and thematic level, the Portuguese collective memory inherited from larger characters of the past such as Gil Vicente, Francisco de Holanda or Bento Espinosa.

Throughout 2018 he exhibited in the most diverse spaces, among them the Zé dos Bois gallery in Lisbon and the Cruzes Canhoto gallery in Porto, where he presented the exhibition “Wheel of Fortune”, with great success.

All works exhibited are available for online purchase.If you are interested please contact us.